The most interesting aliens of TOS

The very first ones filmed. The Talosians. Possibly the most interesting of all Trek. They aren't vengeful. They let Pike go accepting their death sentence. And have enough compassion to take Pike back.

I've always liked the Vulcans the most. But the Tholians are definitely a close runner-up in my book.

Interesting question about whether it was Spock or the Keeper that came up with the idea to help Pike. I never gave it much thought before. I'll have to give it some thought. Looking forward to everyone's opinion on this!

They are certainly up there. Non-humanoid. Not even carbon-based (emphasizing their alienness and the difficulty in recognizing their eggs as eggs). Unusual life-cycle of only one mother (again emphasizing their alienness and the difficulty of noticing them). And yet there is a way to find common ground. They are not completely unlike us, because they have a generational reproductive cycle and thereby instincts similar to ours that we can relate to and understand. The episode itself is very fine and suffers mainly from some cheesiness in the monster attacks ("you go over here by yourself and get dramatically killed by the monster").

In addition to the Horta, I'll nominate the Vulcans, the cosmic cloud from "One of Our Planets Is Missing", the Q, the Borg, the Companion, the Tholians, the two-dimensional creatures flying into the cosmic string, the Tamarians, the Trill.

They are certainly up there. Non-humanoid. Not even carbon-based (emphasizing their alienness and the difficulty in recognizing their eggs as eggs). Unusual life-cycle of only one mother (again emphasizing their alienness and the difficulty of noticing them). And yet there is a way to find common ground. They are not completely unlike us, because they have a generational reproductive cycle and thereby instincts similar to ours that we can relate to and understand. The episode itself is very fine and suffers mainly from some cheesiness in the monster attacks ("you go over here by yourself and get dramatically killed by the monster").

In addition to the Horta, I'll nominate the Vulcans, the cosmic cloud from "One of Our Planets Is Missing", the Q, the Borg, the Companion, the Tholians, the two-dimensional creatures flying into the cosmic string, the Tamarians, the Trill.

In addition to the Horta, I'll nominate the Vulcans, the cosmic cloud from "One of Our Planets Is Missing", the Q, the Borg, the Companion, the Tholians, the two-dimensional creatures flying into the cosmic string, the Tamarians, the Trill.

In addition to the Horta, I'll nominate the Vulcans, the cosmic cloud from "One of Our Planets Is Missing", the Q, the Borg, the Companion, the Tholians, the two-dimensional creatures flying into the cosmic string, the Tamarians, the Trill.

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TOS, my friend. The subject is TOS aliens. I'll but the cloud from TAS, maybe.

The Tholians. Thoroughly alien, enigmatic, vaguely arthropod-like (detectable even in TOS, I felt), and totally xenophobic. None of this "gosh, we're out in space, let's make friends with folks" stuff for them.

Korob and Sylvia from 'Catspaw' - totally alien creatures from another galaxy trying to understand humans but locking in on the wrong part of the mind instead.

Tholians are second runner up- as finally shown in their full form later, another true alien race made of crystal, very territorial and as mentioned above, punctual.

While there are a lot of aliens throughout the series, I like obviously the ones which are not actors in makeup but creatures so different that you might not even recognize them as sapient beings, they have their own world view and a lot of difficulty dealing with humans

Korob and Sylvia from 'Catspaw' - totally alien creatures from another galaxy trying to understand humans but locking in on the wrong part of the mind instead.

Tholians are second runner up- as finally shown in their full form later, another true alien race made of crystal, very territorial and as mentioned above, punctual.

While there are a lot of aliens throughout the series, I like obviously the ones which are not actors in makeup but creatures so different that you might not even recognize them as sapient beings, they have their own world view and a lot of difficulty dealing with humans

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Along those lines, the Kelvans. And I agree with you. The really alien aliens (especially non-humanoids) are most interesting.

The Tholians. Thoroughly alien, enigmatic, vaguely arthropod-like (detectable even in TOS, I felt), and totally xenophobic. None of this "gosh, we're out in space, let's make friends with folks" stuff for them.

Just weird. Punctual, too.

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It's also interesting too see a non-humanoid species having an organized society technologically developed.

The TOS Romulan are also pretty interresting as a potential "lost tribe" of Vulcan.

I'll throw in the Eminians of "A Taste of Armageddon." It'd be an interesting study to see how stepping into disintegration chambers became so normal, especially in the beginning, where most likely it would've been seen as crazy.

Although I think the Andorians and the Gorn are cool, I excluded them because we didn't really find anything else about them in TOS besides humanoid warrior aliens with antennae and hostile anthropomorphic lizard aliens, respectively. The first really interesting Andorian in all of Star Trek was Thelin, and we find out very little about him indeed. (That said, Nalder was great in the minor role of Shras.) We have to go all the way to Shran to get a real live-action Andorian character. The Gorn captain speaks, and it's interesting as far as it goes, but in my opinion he didn't constitute a dynamic character, and rather he served only as an exposition delivery device.

The TOS aliens I focused on were, in my opinion, much more interesting than just their superficial traits, and we actually find out something about the characters of their respective species. The only exception was the Tholians, whom we really learned nothing about, but their coolness factor (via the visual effect and Babcock's multi-track voice performance) was so great that I couldn't help myself.

Furthermore, with a single exception, I discarded the humanoid aliens as patently uninteresting.

To recollect (having gotten straight which forum/thread this is; in my defense, I posted in another thread around the same time about aliens in general), so far I've nominated:

Horta
Vulcans
the cosmic cloud from "One of Our Planets Is Missing"
the Companion
Tholians
Medusans

Vulcans would have been excluded for being pointy-eared humanoids, except that their culture was so very interesting and Spock is my favorite character in all of Star Trek.

I'm not saying that people are wrong to find humanoid aliens interesting; I'm just explaining my thought process.